There's only one choice really, unless you want to go fisheye... Sigma 8-16mm. Good value at SRS at the moment, £375 IIRC. It has reviewed very positively. The 10-20mm is another option but obviously it's not as wide.

Something like the DA10-16mm fisheye will cram an even larger field of view in than a 'rectilinear' lens, but obviously the distortion might not be suitable. De-fishing is possible but you end up cropping the image anyway and who wants all that PP work and image degradation. [Edit - sorry you did mention you didn't want fisheye anyway!]

I find the 50 a bit long and think the 35 f2.4 is perfect for family snaps and portraits. I tend to use it wide open.

The Messenger Boy 2500 looks great. I'm fairly sure it would take the 55-300 mounted and there's space for another lens at the side (with a divider). And it's small and well padded. Downside is I got their last one in Khaki... burnt orange anyone? link

There is a proper fisheye lens which is pretty unique for a compact, and reasonably priced. That doesn't get away from the high price of the body though.

This is true, I would probably err towards Canon s95 just because its cheaper. I'd take either over a Sony which doesn't offer RAW, although the TX5 is great value as a cheapy. If I had loadsamoney though, the cuteness of the Q and ability to collect lenses would probably win me over. Why get an X100 over a Kr? They both feature similar sensors but the X100 costs about four times as much. Some people overlook cost vs performance and just buy something because it's a fun toy to play with.

I wonder how this compares to lightroom in practice. Running a linux OS like Ubuntu is a nice idea for general use but i've always kept running Windows to use PS and LR3.

Deffo worth taking it to show them your website, or you could run a slide show of images on it.

That's amazing! I shot at high iso a few times on my istDL2 and the results were horrible and snowy, i'm amazed at the difference. Perhaps its the strides made with post processing noise reduction?

They may be able to pay via paypal on their phone though. How tech savvy are people at craft fairs? lol

You can get lcd shades and even loupes which clip on to the lcd.

I would have thought it would be padded, to call itself a DSLR bag? I've just ordered a Crumpler Messenger Boy 2500 bag from SRS - i'll let you know if it looks big enough for the 55-300. It's only £20.